gehringer_2

I don't know about Del but I know Yoda was reading the forum when this address was pretty much being explicitly posted. He seemed pretty PO'd about what was happening. But he had also mentioned he was thinking about moving out of SoCal so maybe his plate is full. In Del's case maybe it will take some piston wins....

Martin makes two of finest pitches you will ever see to Chris Taylor, then make the mistake of the game on an 0-2 pitch. Bye-bye baseball. Never throw a hittable pitch 0-2.

Wings have a tendency to lapse into a style of brainless lazy passing.. Just impossible to maintain possession or sustain pressure.

Right - we don't know. Campbell did throw him under the bus a little this week though - he at least half implied Decker could be be playing in stuff I read the other day.

42 is still as close an anyone I know has gotten.

I heard a few minutes of Valenti yesterday and he was going nutz (in a fairly amusing way) about this, couldn't come up with anything other than that they are holding him out because they are trying to trade him. Another theory I can think of being that with his replacement already on the roster playing LT, Decker wants to be traded while he is still considered a starting LT because it improves his future income potential.

true enough. The latest generation of WIFI is faster than the average home's incoming bandwidth.

Backasswardness. How there even still be school boards telling kids how to wear their hair?

I wonder if there can be such a thing. The team with the best record went out in the 1st round.

Can't follow the geography. Router is upstairs, roughly above the furnace room which is downstairs? Home workspace is downstairs somewhere? You want an ethernet jack on the wall to plug into the router and that goes downstairs somewhere. So you want a CAT 6 terminated in an interior wall upstairs that then goes down through the stud at the base of interior wall and through the sub-flooring and into an area of unfinished ceiling in the basement? That seems straightforward - I don't follow where two holes come in.

It all comes down to how good these young players are. If they add to the 3 positions Avila has committed to: SS, C, SP with players who are at least moderate improvements, then I would say the remaining projection (and injury!) uncertainty for Mize, Skubal, Manning, Greene and Torkelson and Baddoo is easily the difference between contending and 500 next season. Of course it is still unlikely they all become stars, but they they still hold out the possibility, and for the team to even have that chance is a really nice change.

How much time do you have? Not really my story to tell but glad you found our new home.

this

they started calling above the waist a number of years ago - about the same time that they started getting guys out on the swing and miss high fastball. The two things are directly related. A batter never has to swing at a ball above the waist 20yr ago because they were not called strikes. They have to swing now because the zone is called up higher - which the graphic demonstrates. The high strike was also called back in the 60's, in part because of the umpires position with the external balloon chest protector.

I don't have the data in front of me but Garneau and Greiner by be eligible as minor league FAs. Pretty sure they burned Grayson's last option this year at any rate.

Sure - that is the overall issue. But what comes after in a particular case does bring the significance of him not being good at his job into higher relief. But the other question is: "Is he really bad at his job?" He's only bad at ball and strikes if he is not calling the zone he intends to call, and judging by the nearly universal trend toward an increase in balls wide to the outside being called strikes across the league I have an increasingly hard time believing this is not an intentional outcome.

Look - someday veganism may become the dominant culture and they may think everyone who ate meat or owned a cattle ranch was a bad guy and needs to be 'de-memorialized' ( too bad for LBJ! ). And that will be their right. So they will put up statues to the great liberators of the ungulates of their day. But in a generation or two it will transpire that the great ungulate liberators were great sinners against some other standard that will apply 100 yrs later. Dust in the wind - all of it.

LOL - the thing is I don't care where it ends. They can grind the faces off Rushmore and I wouldn't give a rat's ass one way or the other. Teaching, understanding and appreciating history and making heroic statuary to 'heroes' of a particular era have nothing to do with one another in the least.

'Generic' is the key. An monument like IwoJima is fundamentally anonymous, it to a type or class. I wouldn't class those with monuments clearly to individual people.

Moses probably had it right - no graven images, no debates on personal histories... Sure it's a dumb debate, but that's only because the premises are so weak on all sides. Just for grins, here is another nuance: Lincoln sitting quietly in a chair vs Lee on horse in uniform with a sword......What the artist was trying to do probably matters, but that's an even muddier pool to wade into...

they showed the overhead shot of the call on JD and the ball was two diameters wide the whole way. (and yeah - I know, it's 17" but I calculated 1.5 feet for simplicity)

If a ball breaks even 3 feet across 55 feet (which is a huge breaking ball) , it only breaks about 1" in the 18 inches across the plate. The ump may be fooled by the break but not by the amount it's breaking while it's over the plate.

I haz a sad for you

I fundamentally disagree with Charon's unsupported premise that "Nations need heros." Nations need ideals, ethics, dedication to principle, they don't need to worship men because as Mona points out eloquently enough, ALL men are flawed enough to be dubious lights for others. Celebrate the accomplishment, always reserve judgement on deifying the person. The DOI is actually more striking once we understand the moral frailty of the people that wrote it, not less. We don't *need* 'heroic' statues of anyone.

The one call on JD was about as bad as I have seen this season. It seems pretty clear to me that the league has instructed umps to call wide this year - particularly to the outside, which seems to just to re-inforce all the worst trends in the game. It strongly favors sliders, which are the hardest pitch on pitcher's arms, it increases Ks and thus adds to the all or nothing aspect of the hitting, and it injects another huge dose of random outcome noise into a game already has enough built into it.